Books

Cruise Missile Liberals

Buy Cruise Missile Liberals

*Note: Author advance and all royalty payments for this book are donated to the Red Door Family Shelter. Learn more about how this organization helps women and families.

WARNING: Cruise Missile Liberals contains few “proper” poems. That is, poems with proper manners, proper etiquette, or proper service to our national narratives. Poems that reassure the powerful. Poems that lie inert—with the smell of the museums. Poems that are, in a word, nice.

Instead, Spencer Gordon’s debut smoulders with explosive contradiction—with a charismatic voice that rewires what we could ask for in a collection. Blending gaudy lyrical excess with blemish-ridden found material, it presents the reader with guiltily pleasurable collisions. It is of the wretched present: online, urban, urbane, and sweetly ironic. These are poems of play, rant, irreverence, and lip; of sparkling newness haunted by the opulent, hungry dead. Works brimming with cheek that, every so often, stiffen to a punch to the gut.

Like an updated Civil Elegies for a digital generation, Cruise Missile Liberals is a blistering debut from an author leaving his own bite-mark on “Canadian Literature.”​

Praise and Press

Spencer Gordon interviewed by the IFOA (International Festival of Authors) on their blog.

Spencer Gordon’s poetry debut, Cruise Missile Liberals, might be the oddball balm you need … Gordon’s poems are completely submerged in the zany, disturbing thick of it … Gordon doesn’t just question the place of poetry (here in an overtly political Canadian context), he interrogates the role of the poet as a citizen, directly implicating himself in the critique.
—Domenica Martinello, The Globe and Mail

Gordon displays an acerbic wit and a knack for nifty turns of phrase as he takes satirical aim at the absurdities of life in consumer society and our obsession with celebrity … He can be cheekily funny … Cruise Missile Liberals offers plenty of laughs, but it’s also got heart.
—Barbara Carey, Toronto Star

Cruise Missile Liberals is a complex and accomplished first collection from a writer who has honed his voice by listening. Gordon’s examination of the self in late capitalism is not always optimistic but is, in its humanity, enormously affirming.
—Stevie Howell, Quill and Quire, Starred Review

The poems in Spencer Gordon’s Cruise Missile Liberalssurvey political, corporate and pop-culture landscapes (so often now one and the same) and comment sadly on their devastation, while never forgetting how great Taylor Swift used to be … [A book of] disturbing, wry intelligence … [and] taut, careful craft.
—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

When Gordon takes his foot off of the brakes he speeds into some beautifully hellish chaos; when it breaks his previously calm surface ripples over all of us. These poems are a new type of missile … This is heart-wrenching and powerful stuff. Cruise Missile Liberals is full of marvellous stuff.
—Michael Dennis, Today’s Book of Poetry

Advance Praise

Spencer Gordon’s Cruise Missile Liberals is, as its title suggests, a very funny, often despairing book. Jammed with on-point pop and breathtaking turns of phrase, this collection of poems is genuinely compelling: it is hard to stop reading, so sweetly twisted is Gordon’s world.

— Lynn Crosbie, Author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Life Is About Losing Everything, and Liar

There is a generosity of spirit on offer here for we who are tired, placeless, saturated in social media, and wasted on the bright horror of a future that never arrives. This collection is deft, intelligent, and tender, if tenderness is something that can also crush you—an intimacy that panics shut. For we who are “Nature Woke,” “alchemical kids with gold teeth,” “wanting to live as I do, shockingly new,” Gordon sings and memes against “Canada the Good” and presents us with an arresting portrait of our present moment.

Cruise Missile Liberals could easily be called Late Capitalism.Spencer Gordon voices the anger and dejection that many of us feel as we survey the detritus of our political and corporate ideologies and attempt to find an alternative to the cultural crack that has previously pacified us. But Gordon does not patronize us with false hope. “There is no system to replace the ruling system,” he writes in “Ticker Tape.” Elsewhere, he notifies us: “If you are crying, you are not winning. There is no good living.” As a solution: “You should burn down your life.” Like an excitable social media stream, these poems persist to the point of “sincere emotional fatigue” yet somehow Gordon manages to make an art of exhaustion, an art of the rant. Reading Gordon’s poetry and fiction, one feels caught in a Mobius strip where life and entertainment loop infinitely into each other. We are sometimes ourselves and sometimes we are Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, and Peppa Pig. Or they are us, our teetering elected representatives.

— Ian Williams, Author of Personals (Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize), Not Anyone’s Anything, and You Know Who You Are

* * *

Cosmo

An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal, stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to ﬁlm the sex scene of his life. Such are the speakers and stars of a collection of stories that explode the conventions of short ﬁction.

Though shifting wildly in tone, structure and perspective from one page to the next, each of these mercurial stories is drenched in pop culture, the distancing effects of modern communication and the malaise of solitary existence. At their core, these stories are a portrait of ordinary people (as well as celebrities – they’re just like us!) striving, thinking and suffering alone.

‘Try any first page here, and, if you are not mouth agape with voyeuristic thrill, then this writer is not Spencer Gordon, one of the most daring writers I’ve ever come across. These stories read like collaborations between Stephen King and TMZ with Borges and Nabokov on the edits. Each short story sounds with the thunder of a novel. Enthralling, dark, gut-busting stuff!’
– Jeff Parker, author of Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal and Ovenman

‘Sprung from Spencer Gordon’s media-saturated world and fuelled by his immense talent, Cosmo is a giddy ride of cultural riffs and intoxicating language. And in the midst of this sensual swirl of words, the reader encounters a van-load of profound and mournful truths.’
– Trevor Cole, author of Practical Jean and The Fearsome Particles

‘Demonstrates a refreshing willingness to test the plasticity of language and structure … The 10 stories in Cosmo are an investigation into the nature of authenticity in an age that seems ever more mediated and synthetic. How is it possible to live a meaningful life in the world that lionizes surfaces and shallowness? Gordon provides no comfortable, simplistic answers, but his approach to asking the questions is startling and invigorating.’
– Steven W. Beattie, Quill and Quire, Starred Review

‘Not only a collection of fiction but also a work of cultural criticism … It succeeds not only as a well-wrought and keenly written collection of narratives, but also as a work of analysis … Cosmo is a rare book in that it is brave enough to explore the ways in which being loved in private has a very real counterpoint in public, in the form of fame, public identity and cultural cache. In doing so, Gordon dissects the very idea of the authentic in an increasingly public world in which the self is ever more constructed.’
– Natalie Zina Walschots, National Post

‘Stylistically, Gordon plays both with the detached language of the professional bio and the dry data presentation of an internet wiki. But he is also playing with our assumptions about what culture counts as Culture and why. By treating the lives of now moribund teen celebrities—surely one of the most derided and pathetic by-products of pop culture’s tireless grind—with a sense of dignity, he invites a reckoning with the vacuity of most human accomplishment and with mortality itself. Gordon ends the sequence by breaking the pattern and giving us a bio of Helen Keller, which feels both ridiculous and absolutely perfect; when we get to the emotionally devastating last paragraph, it feels inevitable and totally surprising. It’s a clever and provocative piece of writing, and I find myself returning to it over and over again to remind myself of how it works and why … Thinking about it now, it makes me excited to see what this generation will accomplish when it hits its stride.’– André Forget, The Walrus

‘The cheek and irony serve as mechanisms for a throat-punchingly intimate portrayal of doubt and self-loss … Cosmo presents its stakes loudly and clearly, tinged as much in neon as in sepia—or maybe a heartbreakingly tacky sepia-toned filter. These are arresting stories, and as voyeurs and disciples and melancholics, we are all made implicit in this grotesquification.’
– Rob Benvie, HTMLGIANT

‘Disarming, technically accomplished … deserves a wide readership … Gordon finds what matters in his exploration of one of the widest varieties of psyches you are likely to come across in short fiction.’
– Victor Enns, Winnipeg Free Press

‘His stories are fun, intoxicating, and the language is drunk on a high-energy style more lively than a dancefloor … His work is other-worldly, and his imagination rocket-launches CanLit to brave new heights, soaring past the black hole of sameness and familiarity of story that most of CanLit gets sucked into … You haven’t read a voice like this before, and you won’t forget it either.’
– Chad Pelley, Telegraph-Journal (Saint John)

‘Cosmo is impossible to tear away from without gushing embarrassing mawkishness … Gordon has the rare ability, startling when revealed, when flexed, to make one laugh (this is a wildly funny book), then, and within such tight proximity, perhaps even feel a choke.’
– Karl Fenske, Lemon Hound

‘Not your average collection of short stories … A dark collection, filled with murder and fear … [with] a faint undercurrent of hope … A fast and interesting read that may leave you breathless.’
– Merry Hakin, Scene (London)

‘His prose has this wonderfully hallucinatory surreal quality. He isn’t afraid of long sentences and lush exuberant poetic language. Even the comic sections have this underlying throbbing intensity that never lets up.’
– Barry Webster, CBC Canada Writes

‘Spencer’s highly-lauded collection of short stories, Cosmo, is like reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men scrawled into the margins of People magazine. His technical ability is never in question while you read through the tales, and there’s a palpable delight evident on the page as he cuts to the unlikely emotional hearts of situations and characters you may never have considered in the same way.’
– Katie Fewster-Yan & Kris Bone, Ruckus Reading Series

‘Gordon has complete command over his weirdness and can make a reader feel right at home … I don’t know how he does it, but I felt as deeply involved and related to those characters as I do in any kitchen-sink realism—and this was a lot funnier too.’
– Rebecca Rosenblum, CBC Canada Writes​

‘Gordon’s short story collection Cosmo has earned the writer comparisons with David Foster Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis for his emphasis on form, sentences, and waxing philosophic on pop culture phenomena.’
– Lauren Oyler, Dazed Magazine